Once, while studying groundwater contamination at an air base in Florida, I was taken to several old, abandoned landfills to determine which of them should be drilled for testing. One presented a real problem: In the twenty years since it had been closed, the landfill had been planted with pine trees — part of the […]
Category Archives: climate change
How high’s the water, Mama? Five feet high and risin’. How high’s the water, Papa? She said it’s five feet high and risin’. Well, the rails are washed out north of town. We gotta head for higher ground. We can’t come back till the water goes down, Five feet high and risin’ ~ Johnny Cash, […]
“A big part of the problem is most people don’t know much about trees, and think, well, trees are good and no trees are bad,” he says. “But trees are just like people, they have a multitude of differences. Some trees are human-friendly, and some are just the opposite.” ~ Tom Ogren quoted by Sabrina […]
“The message is clear and so is the pathway. But time is running out. We need to take a bold stand and act upon it now.” ~ Nicole Schwab and Kristin Rechberger Long ago, when I was working on the Navajo Reservation, there was a winter flood. Although few homes were directly impacted, the heavy […]
“Prior to the late 19th century, night air was considered dangerous in most Western cultures …” ~ Wikipedia “Wherever the cloud of pollution travels, crime increases.” ~ Sefi Roth The idea has been rebuffed by modern science and our understanding of contagion (not withstanding anti-vaxxers), but according to Wikipedia: “Based on “zymotic” theory, people believed […]
“They paved paradise And put up a parking lot Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘Till it’s gone” ~ Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi It was basically a 50’s strip mall that occupied two sides of a square block, with room for plenty of parking in the middle […]
“There is, however, a catch: The world must act now … If we’re too slow to start better managing and protecting these natural systems, the inaction will damage nature’s ability to help heal the planet … In other words, the longer we wait, the less nature can do.” ~ The Nature Conservancy We seem to […]
“Government-backed research on watersheds in the U.S. provide a dire outlook for the future: population growth and climate change are likely to cause “serious water shortages” within the next 55 years, says the study.” ~ Renae Reints George Tsosie pulled up and nodded to me as he got out of his pickup at the watering […]
“All of which is to say: our current methods of commercial farming got us to where we are, but the way we farm now isn’t sustainable for the planet, for individuals or for societies long-term … The reality is that we have to quickly and efficiently bring farming from the industrial age into the digital […]
“By one measure, bugs are the wildlife we know best, the nondomesticated animals whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. We sometimes feel that we know them rather too well. In another sense, though, they are one of our planet’s greatest […]
Writes of Nature 